Contents
Reel 1 – Our Presentation Feature
Introduction
The World of ‘45
’45 Style
Sample Characters
History
How Things Are
Reel 2 – Attack of the 50 foot Game Mechanics
Rule 1 – Core Mechanic
Rule 2 – Complications
Rule 3 – Character Creation
Rule 4 – Combat
Rule 5 – Vehicles
Equipment List
Director’s Cut – Featuring Pages of New Material!
Creating a ’45 Character
Creating a ’45 Adventure
Sample Adventure – Naught but Bones!
Appendix 1 – Villains
Appendix 2 – Optional Rules
Appendix 3 – Slang
Index

There’s a world where pin-up babes, hardbitten private eyes, rock n’ roll rebels and hotrodding mutants duke it out with Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and giant tarantulas. Where Martians (they want our women, you know) patrol the skies and Elvis, with an extra arm, green skin and a chrome-plated .45 pistol, cruises the highways and byways of a radioactive America in a tuned up Chevy.

This is the world of ’45 Psychobilly Retropocalypse, a spiffy new game from Postmortem Studios, written by James “Grim” Desborough, the fellow behind the popular “100 Adventure Seeds” supplement series, and the well-received game of social activism,“@ctiv8”.

Clocking in at 104 pages of pure, nitro-driven psychobilly madness, 45PR is chock full of B-movie goodness, and it just screams “Play me!” The illustration is really above par, with sexy post-apocalyptic pin-up girls sharing the pages with giant spiders and mutants; the text features hilarious stand-out quotes like “I just killed a man for this cup of joe, and I’ll do it again” juxtaposed with clip-art images of 50's Brylcreemed, fedora-wearing men and perfectly coiffed housewives. The book’s designers really did a great job of capturing what 45PR is all about.

Essentially, the game is a wild-eyed pulp imagining of a world where both the Allies and Axis developed nuclear weapons, ending World War II in an all-out h-bomb dropping slugfest. Its years later, and America is a radioactive wasteland of mutant greasers, weird science and beautiful dames. 45PR is like a cross between “It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show” and “Gamma World.”

Characters in 45PR are written to be larger-than-life, and the juxtaposition of post-apocalyptic and 50’s Creature Feature genre conventions provides for a very wide range of unusual character concepts, from Road Warrior/Betty Page mash-ups to Beach Blanket Bingo-playing Robot Monsters. The game comes with several archetypal characters already statted out and ready to play.

The only bump in the proverbial road of character creation is that, despite the inclusion of a Merits and Flaws system, the author provided very little in the way of specifics, leaving the player and GM to create these things on the fly. Although this shouldn’t be much of a problem for a creative GM, it is somewhat peculiar that a post-apocalyptic game like 45PR would not feature a more substantial representation of the mutations that are a standard of the more fantasy-oriented works of the post-apocalypse genre. This isn’t a deal-killer, but the extra information would have been greatly appreciated.

The game system is highly cinematic, which well suits the B-movies from which the game draws its inspiration. Adjudicating the challenges of an adventure takes very little time or forethought thanks to the flexibility of “Xpress,” Postmortem Studio’s in-house game system.

Task resolution is generally determined through some permutation of the following very simple procedure: the player gathers a number of six-sided dice equivalent to the score of the attribute most suitable for the task at hand., and rolls to beat a target number determined by checking their skill level against a chart within the book. Each die rolled successfully in this initial grouping is re-rolled once, and then all successes are added together, with the total indicating the relative success or failure of the endeavor.

The background of 45PR is well-detailed, with lots of notes provided on the various city-states and adventure locales of post-apocalypse America. Big cities like Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas and New York all receive some mention, with adventure seeds suggested for each.

One of the really great features of 45PR is that the author included a fairly comprehensive glossary of 40’s and 50’s slang, this really helps to flavor the game for gamers, who in most cases weren’t even born then.

Additionally, the author provided a very comprehensive list of music, movies, games and books that will serve as a veritable wellspring of inspiration for anyone who might not know where to start a 45PR game. When you see Little Richard, The Misfits, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon together on a list of creative influences, you get a pretty good idea of what the game is all about.

In all, 45PR is an excellent acquisition for any gamer looking for something a little different to run at their table, and worth its weight in gold for any fan of schlocky B-movies, the post-apocalyptic genre, or both. Even without the Xpress system that the game is bundled with, the book itself would be a great sourcebook to use with any other “generic” gaming system.












 

Crap! This is supposed to be labeled "other gaming system" "Sci fi", NOT "adventure"!
If anyone can tell me how to edit my review I'll take care of it.
M